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Never put a PC/104 setup in a system that's going to be subjected to vibration

PC-104 is rather retro at this point, but there is something called a Can-Tainer for using PC-104 in hostile environments. "Internally, each corner of the PC/104 stack is held in place by a rubber corner system ... Externally, the anodized aluminum enclosure mates with a thick rubber-mounting pad..."

We tried one of those in 2003-2005 for our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle. (Getting board stacks into the Can-Tainer is a huge pain.) Even then, PC-104 was retro. We ended up with Tri-M industrial Pentium 4 PCs, which turned out to have an overheating problem due to really lame case design. (The CPU fan was aimed at a solid metal case bottom.) Back then there were fewer rugged computer options. Today, that situation is much better. There are good low-cost "Car PC" devices suitable for the automotive environment. Mobile hard drives are smaller and more shock-resistant. So today, getting enough compute power onto your large robot isn't a problem.

It's a good time to build robots. Many of the pieces that were hard to find or troublesome a decade ago are now mature products. Rugged computers, laser rangefinders, high precision GPS systems, attitude and heading reference systems, and servomotor controllers are all commercially available and not outrageously priced. A decade ago, you could get all of those things, but they were more expensive and didn't work as well.

Now that it has been established by many posts that the drives are crap when it comes to ethernet perhaps someone can suggest a better product?

Implementing ethernet to IDE (using smb) for portable enclosures can't be *that* difficult to get right, can it? I can appreciate that USB and ethernet are not the same thing but the ICs to do the job exist. There are plenty of TCP/IP stack implementations available, smb is implemented in Samba (which is open source and therefore cheap).

This device is not quite what I am talking about but it's real close.

You just sit in your car and try to find coke machines that are leaving the facility and are transmiting.

Lumpy (I think was his name) has posted a link to dpie who have a device devloped for Budweiser (of USA) to use in promotions ... if you read the linked article (which I posted an excerpt of elsewhere) then you'd find answers to many of the questions you have.

No, the transmitter is activated on opening the can.

See above

Yup sure looks like it www.dpie.com/news/gpscan.html (<-- that link again).

The GPS coordinates (or possibly raw data?) will be sent via GSM (mobile phone carrier) signal, alerting some marketing hoodlums to come and rough you up!

Yeah, they can even respond to the 'coke can' and query it for more details.

Undoubtedly. What a twisted society we live in. Next thing we know we'll all be buying PCs instead of sending food and medical aid to the starving and downtrodden of the world ....

Are they going to fit a cell phone into the can, too??

Basically, yes.

Somebody else in this thread pointed out a page by the company that does it, explaining the technology.

In a nutshell, opening the can triggers the GPS unit, which squirts the coordinates via SMS. Company receives the info, dispatches prize van. No worries about drinking the device, it's pretty big and the can is otherwise empty.

Yup it's true....

Here is how they do it.

http://www.dpie.com/news/gpscan.html